"If there is no operating system, no matter how powerful the chip is, no matter how good the car is, it will be built on the beach. If the problem of 'lack of core and soul' is not solved, the car industry will not go fast and will not go far." In the second half of last year, the industry authority pointed out that the industry's "lack of core" has been taken seriously, but the "lack of soul" is easy to be ignored. Many automobile enterprises have gradually realized the importance of chips for the independent control of the automobile supply chain, but the operating system is a more urgent problem to be solved than the chips, and is the key to determine the success or failure of the automobile intellectualization and networking. At present, the development pattern of global smart cars has not been determined, and the time window left for China's auto industry is about three years, up to five years.

　　In fact, people in the industry have now said that "software defines cars", which means that people more or less realize that the "new four modernizations" will bring disruptive changes to the whole life cycle of car definition, architecture, development, verification, sales, service and so on. But specifically, why "software defines cars"? How does software define cars? How to realize software definition of car? Further, to what extent has the development of autonomous vehicle software reached? Can the industry's demand for automotive software be fully met? What key areas will the development of automotive software in the future? What are the characteristics? The answers to these questions not only depend on in-depth research, but also come from the practice and exploration of the industry and enterprises.

　　On December 26, 2022, NeuSAR 4.0, a new version of the basic software, was officially released by NeuSAR, which not only continued to improve in terms of AUTOSAR (open system architecture for automobiles), but also launched a new application development framework for automobile software for cross-domain integration, marking another major evolution of NeuSAR products.

　　The reporter learned that Neusoft Ruichi had established a basic software team at the beginning of its establishment. In 2017, it participated in the AUTOSAR organization and was a senior member unit. Since 2018, NeuSAR 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 versions and NeuSAR DS (Domain System), a software development platform for domain controllers, have been released successively, taking the lead in realizing the mass production and landing of domestic "AUTOSAR AP+CP+middleware" full-stack software platform products. In the China Basic Software Ecological Committee (AUTOSEMO) established in July 2020, Neusoft Ruichi became the first rotating chairman unit.

　　At the time when the industry's voice for independent research and development of the operating system is rising, the "software defines the car" is deepening, and all participants are starting to compete in the market, Cao Bin, the general manager of Neusoft Ruichi Automotive Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., accepted an exclusive interview with the reporter of China Auto News to elaborate on the understanding of the development of the automotive operating system and the judgment of the future development trend of automotive software.

　　New requirements and new architecture for vehicle development

　　"If a few years ago, the industry's attitude towards' software defines cars' was still somewhat ambiguous; now, no matter international giants or domestic enterprises, no matter the traditional mainstream car companies or the new forces of car manufacturing, they have reached a consensus on this." Cao Bin said to reporters directly, "According to our observation, the vehicle enterprises with rapid progress have entered the stage of mass production or quasi mass production. Some of them have adopted the evolution scheme of electronic and electrical architecture with a relatively large span, while the other part has adopted the scheme of local domain control."

　　In order to make it easier for the outside world to understand the changes brought by "software defines cars", Cao Bin used mobile phones as an analogy, Further explained: "Mobile phones have changed from functional machines to smart machines, but it is difficult for consumers to perceive that their development methods have changed significantly. The majority of controllers on traditional cars are embedded systems, which is similar to the development of mobile phone functional machines. In the future, as the electronic and electrical architecture of the whole vehicle enters the era of domain controllers, how to solve the reliability, real-time, efficiency improvement and other issues of development based on modern computing platforms will become new demands." He believes that in the future, there will be a development framework, development tools and development platform based on new requirements in the industry.

　　In the context of "software defines the car", SOA (service-oriented architecture) has become a mainstream model because of its support for hardware and software decoupling, and the use of computing performance. "SOA must have 'ideas' first, and then' methods'. The gap between the two can be as short as 1-2 years, and as long as 3-5 years." Cao Bin told reporters, "At present, in the automotive industry, SOA is objectively at the initial stage of putting forward 'ideas'. To continue to develop, the automotive industry needs its own development framework, development tools and development platform."

　　Operating system "develops in a broad sense and drives in a narrow sense"

　　In the unprecedented transformation period of the industry in a century, the new automotive operating system has the soil to emerge at the historic moment. However, what products and solutions are urgently needed in the industry? How should we promote research and development? There are different opinions in the industry.

　　Cao Bin said bluntly that the automobile operating system is indeed a vague formulation. From the current situation, the automotive entertainment communication system is the world of QNX and Android; In automatic driving domain control, new and old frameworks coexist, including AUTOSAR Adaptive, ROS, etc; In the central domain control part, the multi-core heterogeneous architecture with the coexistence of real-time core and non-real-time core is adopted; In the field of traditional pure ECU, AUTOSAR Classic is more used for reference. "It is difficult to define the operating system of a car according to the situation of computers and mobile phones. These consumer electronic products usually have only one central processor. The future computing architecture of the car will be a diversified combination, involving real-time parts, non-real-time parts, and so on. Therefore, there will also be a variety of corresponding operating systems." Cao Bin said.

　　"The most important changes in the automotive operating system are concentrated in three areas, one is the intelligent cockpit, the other is the traditional components, the other is the central domain control and the automatic driving domain control. Although the first two areas have become more difficult to develop, there are still ready-made frameworks and development methods to be adopted." Cao Bin explained, "We judge that, in view of the challenges faced by the central domain control and the automatic driving domain control, a new generalized automotive operating system will be born - an operating system with a certain distributed characteristics centered on the central computing unit and the automatic driving domain control, which deserves the attention of the industry."

　　Cao Bin pointed out: "In the short term, some commonly used automotive operating systems do not support domestic chips, which requires independent narrow sense (microkernel) Operating system; In the long run, the essence of operating system is to create a suitable environment for application development; A successful operating system in the market cannot be separated from a large application development group. China's automobile industry is full of vitality, has enough keen sense of technology development, has strong market grasp ability, and consumers have high support for emerging products. Therefore, the broad (based on the central computing unit) automotive operating system appears in China and will receive growing ecological support. I appeal that the automobile operating system should develop in a broad sense and drive in a narrow sense. "

　　Development framework "connecting the past and the future"

　　The emergence of high computing power chips and other hardware makes vehicle enterprises have to speed up the pace of product development; At the same time, the development of automatic driving operating system, vehicle control operating system and human-vehicle interactive operating system is very complex and heavy workload; Moreover, in the face of the safety and reliability requirements of the car itself, the original development architecture and methods are difficult to achieve better support. Based on these factors, the historical opportunity to build a new pattern of automobile operating system has surfaced. Due to the uniqueness of the automotive industry, the automotive software development and application framework that is suitable for the future operating system should play the role of "connecting the past and the future".

　　"Auto products must be safe and reliable, and we should inherit the existing technology and specifications with awe. For consumers, they expect to experience new car features on the basis of safety and reliability, such as better human-computer interaction, automatic driving, and so on. To make the new part of the experience better, this is our understanding of 'carrying forward and opening up'," Cao Bin said, "" Connecting the preceding and the following "means that we hope to provide a very solid middleware infrastructure to enable vehicle enterprises to achieve proper decoupling of software and hardware. Many key features and features of hardware are standardized and abstracted, providing a relatively stable interface for application development, so that software applications based on operating systems can develop faster and better, and providing better possibilities for rapid hardware iteration."

　　It is reported that NeuSAR of Neusoft Ruichi is the concrete embodiment of this concept. This product includes and enhances AUTOSAR. At the same time, there are a lot of tools and modules that are not involved in AUTOSAR, but are more friendly to central domain control and automatic driving domain control. For example, NeuSAR SF is a middleware application framework in NeuSAR that has enhanced its own characteristics after NeuSAR launched ASF (AUTOSEMO Service Framework).

　　NeuSAR SF frame diagram

　　On the whole, ASF is based on the standard basic software AUTOSAR to expand upwards, solve the problem of heterogeneous chip cross-core fusion of domain controllers, and realize the unified development view of domain controllers. NeuSAR SF is an ASF-compliant SOA middleware, which adds the function of message bus. While supporting the ASF basic services, it extends the development view from the domain controller level to the vehicle level to support the implementation of the vehicle SOA architecture.

　　Software first helps break the development bottleneck

　　Based on the above market judgment and development concept, Neusoft Ruichi has been trying to promote the "software first" development model to the industry.

　　"When developing products, vehicle enterprises usually focus on hardware first, and then define function realization and software development. However, from the perspective of the automotive industry, many of the software developers we usually contact with do not focus on hardware first, but focus on software development itself, and then deploy to hardware." Cao Bin told reporters, "Now, there should be no software or Internet company that first develops laptops or mobile phones for a software application."

　　"Another challenge faced by the traditional development method is that the demand for finished vehicles is changing faster and faster, and the development cycle is becoming shorter and shorter." Cao Bin further pointed out that, "At present, domestic automobile enterprises have the fastest pace of development among their peers, which is driven by multiple factors. China's automobile market is highly active, especially many forward-looking technologies such as new energy vehicles and intelligent networked vehicles have been applied here first; consumers have high expectations for automobile products, and also have high willingness and tolerance for new configurations and new functions. But now, automobile enterprises and suppliers face practical problems Yes, the mismatch between supply and demand. " It is understood that when the complete vehicle enterprise needs to use the operating system of international manufacturers, especially the in-depth customization, it is difficult to respond to the demand in time due to the development pace of the other party.

　　"In view of this, it is very likely that the future situation in the IT field will appear in the automotive industry. Many of the upper layer software that vehicle enterprises pay attention to is closely related to consumers, on the contrary, the relationship between the upper layer software and vehicle hardware has begun to be alienated. For example, for the positioning function in the auto drive system, what optimization algorithm should be applied to provide more accurate location is very important; and it is critical to the location of the positioning system installation The processor and the arranged transmission bus are not the focus of consumers. " In Cao Bin's view, the vehicle enterprises have always followed the "V" development model, clearly defined the vehicle functions, completed the electronic and electrical architecture settings, defined the hardware such as components, and then carried out the software development of components. Finally, the time for the software development of the vehicle was too short. He gave an example. For example, it took a long time to select a chip supplier and then carry out software development. Such a model is "bottleneck".

　　"Domestic complete vehicle enterprises have a faster timeliness demand for product development and iteration, but the traditional development model, huge development scale, severe complexity and limited development time restrict innovation, making it impossible to better display the new functions of vehicles," Cao Bin stressed, "The concept of software first can help automobile enterprises to break out of the rut, develop software first before the hardware is finalized, and then deploy it to the finished vehicle products. This replication based on successful experience in the IT field lacks a development framework and platform that can decouple software and hardware. We hope to help the finished vehicle enterprises realize this new development method through NeuSAR products, which can not only bring better user experience, but also achieve software recovery Use, cross-vehicle platform transplantation and faster iteration. "

　　The new orientation of "combining hard and soft, combining vertical and horizontal"

　　The reporter learned that NeuSAR, as a generalized automotive operating system product independently developed by Neusoft Ruichi, has undertaken such a mission. "In 2018, NeuSAR was officially released. The original intention was to help domestic vehicle enterprises develop more quickly. Later, we found that it was very difficult to develop domain controllers on the AUTOSAR Adaptive version. By constantly refining, accumulating and constructing mature modules during the development process, we released NeuSAR DS (Domain System) in April 2022 To help auto enterprises adapt to the one-stop development environment when developing domain controllers. " In December of the same year, NeuSAR 4.0, a new version of the basic software, was released by NeuSoft Ruichi. While continuing to improve AUTOSAR, it also launched a new application development framework for automotive software for the cross-domain integration stage.

　　NeuSAR development history

　　In addition, Neusoft Ruichi, as the core member of AUTOSEMO and the first rotating chairman unit, took the lead in promoting technical specifications such as ASF and vehicle-cloud integration, and promoted the continuous upgrading and improvement of China's local automobile standards. It is understood that these technical specifications have been applied to domestic mainstream mass production vehicles.

　　"We look forward to the AUTOSAR part of NeuSAR to achieve higher stability and reliability; further, we hope that by continuously increasing investment, developing cooperation, polishing and improving products, it will reach the level of keeping abreast of the international head car software enterprises," Cao Bin said, "In addition, we will also strive to enrich the non-AUTOSAR part, work together with upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain, further strengthen contact with domestic and international chip enterprises, improve the support of hardware products, and cooperate with domestic micro-core enterprises for innovation."

　　It is reported that in addition to software, Neusoft Ruichi has also accumulated nearly 20 years of research and development experience in the field of hardware, and has become one of the first enterprises to deploy the integrated domain controller of the mobile and parking. "In the passenger car market, with the increasingly pragmatic attitude of automobile enterprises towards automatic driving, the mainstream of the market in recent years should be the domain controller of the integration of traffic and parking. Due to the accumulated algorithms and excellent engineering capabilities, our integrated domain controller of traffic and parking can make the chip, camera head, radar and other hardware play its due role, so that automobile enterprises have a more leisurely layout choice, and bring better human-vehicle interaction experience to consumers." Cao Bin believes that in the wave of "software defines cars", Neusoft Ruichi is not a traditional parts enterprise, but should be regarded as a new type of parts enterprise with "soft and hard" and "vertical and horizontal", "For hardware, we focus on 'high threshold' products, which is a kind of vertical business logic. For software, we will continue to invest to form a horizontal business logic, that is, to provide better operating systems, development platforms and application frameworks for automobile enterprises and parts suppliers. While providing better modular products for the industry, we will help automobile enterprises develop customized operating systems to achieve more complex and dynamic development." The development towards will be a higher priority for Neusoft Ruichi in the future. "

　　At present, Neusoft Ruichi has more in-depth cooperation with Guangqi, Chang'an, Dongfeng Landu, Geely and other vehicle enterprises, as well as with suppliers and partners such as Horizon, Centrino Technology, ZTE. It can be predicted that with the continuous development of China's automobile intelligent innovation, the application framework that can truly solve the software development problems in the industrial transformation will also create a new automobile software and hardware ecosystem, and further drive the development and expansion of the domestic automobile operating system core and chip in the form of generalized operating system.

　　This article is reprinted from China Auto News (author: Ma Xin)